Note to Cubs Fans: Beware, Curse Ahead

First appeared on October 14th, 2015
in The Lebanon Reporter

It’s not every day you find a goat blocking rush hour traffic. Still there he was. Standing right in front of your car, trying his best to train a wary eye on you while maintaining focus on the grass in his mouth. He chews on, wobbly-headed and busy reading you like a book.

A Cubs fan your whole life, you’ve suffered through forty plus years of futility. Forty plus years of aimlessly wandering a postseason desert. Forty years of this hairy little guy owning you. From those undersized horns and empty eyes down to his distinguished tassel, you know full well he’s just another bitter soul. Bitter for playing second fiddle all these years to his superstar cousin the sheep. And for what? When’s the last time anyone wore wool after all?

Your Cubs have National League Rookie of the Year, Manager of the Year and Cy Young in the bag, but somehow it’s not enough. After 40 years, you want more. And here they stand, four wins away from their first World Series appearance since 1945.

The expectations of failure have haunted you since the All Star Break. They’re quick with a bar of soap first thing in the shower and from the passenger seat on the way to work, they grumble that maybe this new talk radio phase of yours has gone on a bit too long. They trudge beside you up the stairs, through a maze of cubicles all the way to the tiny one you share with Ed from Accounting, the one prized for being closest to the Men’s room, the same one littered with pictures of Ed’s nine year old son, the future Noble Laureate.

In 2007 you drove all the way to New Orleans and paid a Voodoo Lady $500 to lift the curse. And, after verifying your personal check numbers with her roommate, a part-time soothsayer who moonlighted as a bank teller, Madam Zydeco took the picture of the Bartman Catch you brought along, set it on fire, spread the ashes in a bowl of milk and told you to drink it. Three months later the Cubs were swept by the Diamondbacks in the NLDS.

Now, as you sit behind the wheel with a barrage of blaring horns reigning down on you, you’re seriously thinking about running this goat over. The Russian’s elbowed us out of Syria, why shouldn't you be able to nudge a brazen Bovidae out of the road?

Your belief ran hot and cold all season. Between Rizzo’s 30 home runs and 100 RBI’s, Bryant’s Franchise Rookie Record for homers and Jake Arietta’s inhuman second half stretch, it was all coming together and yet you resisted the urge to become fully invested. After all, you’ve seen the end of this one far too many times.

The experts say this was never supposed to be the year anyway. Its Maddon’s first season and the Cubs, despite being loaded with talent, are just too young. “Don’t put yourself through the pain of the NLCS,” Ed advises, shoulder to shoulder in your cubicle, “Why don’t you come watch Ed Jr. instead? He’s doing a public performance at the community theater, a solo piece on the Abacus he wrote himself.”

Seventy years ago a ticket taker outside Wrigley did what any right thinking human would do and refused to let a goat into a baseball game. Since that time it’s been total darkness on the Northside. And now, the chance of a lifetime presents itself. The chance to erase 70 years of futility with a pair of squealing of tires. After all, they’ve come this far, just a nudge is all they need.

© 2015 Eric Walker Williams

"Progress" comes to Clark and Addison

First appeared on July 11, 2015
in The Lebanon Reporter

A day spent at Wrigley is a day well spent. Forget Florida and its meandering rivers of traffic, or the great outdoors and its fabled tranquility, mosquitoes and near constant threat of bear attacks. Wrigley Field is another world, one you long to visit more and wish others knew less knew about.

So you stand shoulder to shoulder, sharing a prolonged silence with this mass of humanity fate has thrown together in a steel Velveeta box on rails. You avoid eye contact, conversation and interaction of any kind, best not to invite the one you suspect is seriously considering jabbing you in the stomach for your wallet.

Meanwhile the El goes on, listing from side to side while clacking down its tracks. As if you’ve traded an Abraham Lincoln for a ticket back in time, the alleyways and fire escapes of the Brownstones roll past. The homes huddling together and muscle of the trestle that splits them are ripped from a Sinclair novel. Your mind is busy tucking all these images away for later, as your nose has serious questions about the availability of warm water and soap in the Windy City.

For you, this is more than a train ride. It’s therapy. For nothing takes the sting out of a rant from your boss like reminiscing about Wrigley. Forget the overpriced vendors, long lines at the John and warm beer, the only souvenirs you’ll take home are the nostalgic sights and sounds. Lasting images such as the silhouette of downtown cast against an ocean blue sky, or a young father teaching his daughter how to jump a turnstile.

And when your stop arrives and the doors shoosh open, you turn to embrace a scene you didn’t want to leave in the first place. However, instead of an old friends smile or slice of Grannie’s Apple Pie, you’re greeted with something from a Third World Country racked by devastation.

Dump trucks lumber back and forth, navigating a minefield of port-a-potties. With all the synchronicity of a Broadway show, construction workers move seamlessly around each other. It’s the scourge of renovation. A cancer that threatens all you hold dear.

No matter the form, we as humans struggle with change. It’s in our DNA, just ask the boys over at Coca-Cola. Our lives become so choreographed and photocopied that change has a way of reaching out and slapping us every time. A flag goes up, a flag comes down. A presidential candidate who doesn’t tell us what we expect to hear. Renovating Wrigley is like putting lipstick on the Mona Lisa grumbles the old timer behind you.

For whatever reason, your mind is drawn to Millard Fillmore. A stuffed shirt who did little of consequence aside from sleep in the White House for four years, old Mill’s on record as saying one shouldn’t accept change as progress. And as you bask in the glow of the jumbo-tron that now towers over left-center, you know that no truer words have ever been spoken.

Your eyes used to marvel at the hand-operated scoreboard or wander along the bricks until they got lost in the Ivy. Now they’re blinded by 3900 square feet of LED. If this is progress, they can have it. You have satellite TV, microwaveable meals and a one-car detached waiting for you at home.

Not unlike a bad sunburn, we’re often reminded that progress for some is a kick in the shin for others. And yet, it remains our destiny. In the end you’re left to realize that perhaps, not unlike beauty, progress too lies in the eye of the beholder.

© 2015 Eric Walker Williams

A Smashing Start to "Next Year"

First appeared on April 11th, 2015
in The Lebanon Reporter

I don’t ask for much. I’d like a good hot dog and at least one of my children to follow directions the first time. I’d also like flushing toilets in Wrigley and the sports world to stop heckling her like she’s the subject of a Comedy Central roast.

I’m not in construction. The only thing I build are sentences and that’s done on a part time basis and somewhat pedestrian level. But I am a sports fan and I know enough to realize when Opening Day rolls around its best to have your ducks in a row. It’s not like the boys in Chicago had a short off-season after all.

So you pack yourself into a car and point it north for a little slice of heaven the outside world knows as Wrigley Field. You do this knowing full well the baseball gods will shine on you even though it is April and April in Chicago can sometimes require great bravery, or at the very least polar survival gear.

But Ernest Shackleton you are not, you are a Cubs fan and you don’t ask for much. You want a cold beer and a warm dog, a spot out of the wind and a toilet that works. The radio is alive with stories of civil wars fought in countries devoid of natural resources and any qualitative reasons for living there. And while you depart with the full understanding your journey is likely to end in heartbreak and misery, you harbor strong faith in the front office, despite their inability to hire a qualified plumber, and besides, this is ‘next year’ and you want to be able to tell your grandchildren you were there.

But an unexplained postponement leaves you flustered because, not unlike Washington, you are left choosing between a woman who hid her emails from the public and a man so elitist he believes everyone in the U.S. should be above accepting a helping hand. Talk about limited options indeed.

The Action 2 News broadcasts shots of construction crews delivering plastic outhouses to Wrigley, which only brings more inspiration to those jeering her. The jokes keep coming faster than Republican presidential candidates and while she may be undeniably stunning and the closest thing the sports world has to historical perfection, she remains incredibly fragile and self-conscious in the face of her multimillion-dollar renovation.

The Action 2 guy says something about the postponement being linked to a malfunction in the bathrooms on Opening Day before making a joke about a goat and you wonder if his hair is real and try imagining Shackleton’s crew using plastic toilets while crossing the Antarctic. Why can’t they just open the doors? You drove two hours and would be happy to just sit and watch the grass grow under the lights; after all games at Wrigley have always been more of an unavoidable distraction anyway.

So ‘Next Year’ is off to a smashing start as you take a twenty dollar cab back to the parking garage you had to move some stocks around and mortgage your house just to use for a couple hours. And as you limp out of town with your NXTYR vanity plate and Ernie Banks bobble head wobbling on the dashboard, you do so realizing ‘pottygate’ has made the Cubs the laughing stock of baseball. And while it’s not an entirely unfamiliar position, it is one they don’t normally assume until the first or second week of June.

© 2015 Eric Walker Williams

This just in...Baseball is Broken

First appeared on August 16th, 2013
in The Lebanon Reporter

Baseball is broken. In fact Baseball is beyond broken, it’s flat-lining. Lying on the table, a team of despondent doctors surround Baseball, heads shaking at the impotent shell of a once proud national pastime, hobbled by scandal and decaying from extensive overuse of chemical enhancers. Things have gotten so bad that somewhere Babe Ruth has turned over in his grave, not before ordering a double and lighting a cigar of course.

All apologies to Apple Pie, but Baseball has gone so rogue America should file a restraining order as soon as possible to prevent the words “Baseball” and “America” from ever appearing in the same phrase again.

The American public is so over Baseball they’re feverishly awaiting the start of football, this despite a colorful offseason for the NFL which saw countless arrests and other off field issues. Maybe Charles Barkley was right when he said athletes are not “role models”.

So what does Baseball do to fix itself besides get tougher on PED’s and pray for a steroid scandal to hit professional football? Bringing Sosa and McGwire back seems illogical at this point. And this is way beyond increasing the quality of ball game give-aways and tackling concession stand prices. The Cubs could put a replay board the size of Mt. Rushmore in right field and it still wouldn’t heal the scar steroids has left on baseball. This is an issue that, like Babe Ruth and October, threatens to become part of the fabric of the game.

PSA’s and rookie orientation programs won’t scare this elephant from the room either. It appears far too large, too entrenched. You can forget about trotting Pete Rose out too. Nobody can argue his story is tragic and should serve to prevent players from making poor choices, but for players struggling just to break through the stakes are way too high to worry about somebody who hasn’t laced a pair of spikes up in thirty years.

Forget about “This Time it Counts” or replay in baseball, steroids appear destined to become Bud Selig’s legacy. If Ryan Braun and Alex Rodriguez have done anything other than thumb their nose at baseball while shattering the dream of thousands of Little Leaguers everywhere simultaneously, they’ve stranded the Commish at a crossroad as well. If Selig doesn’t do something decisive, something powerful, something Roger Goodell-like soon then steroids stand to bury him too.

Selig’s opportunity has been lost in the buzz surrounding A-Rod’s return and the ridiculous payday Braun will still enjoy despite running the hand that feeds him through a meat grinder. At this point it would appear the only logical move for Selig is to get tough with the Players Association and lobby for a lifetime ban for steroid offenders. The future of the game hangs in the balance.

And if you’re the MLBPA, now’s not the time to come to the rescue of guys like Braun and Rodriguez. Doing so only threatens your legitimacy and risks fracturing your clientele. If Baseball has any chance of getting off the table now all parties involved need to come together and foster real solutions.

A lifetime ban seems the only logical plan of action. When they’re serious, the powers that be will consider a punishment of this magnitude for first time offenders, but until then, this dance we’ve all come to know so well will continue. In the meantime, say a little prayer for Baseball because things don’t look good.

© 2013 Eric Walker Williams

Save Wrigley Field?

First appeared on July 24, 2013
in The Lebanon Reporter

When I was in seventh grade we circulated a petition asking one of our lunch ladies to try different deodorant, and while we generated some much needed hygienic awareness amongst many classmates and picked up a lot of signatures, we also got detention, stern lectures from both Administration and our parents, as well as the coldest hamburgers you could imagine.

So when I received a request recently to sign a petition to “Save Wrigley Field” I was somewhat confused. After all Wrigley does predate the discovery of dirt, so what could it possibly need saving from? Apparently Wrigley needs saving from itself.

Cubs ownership wants to institute $500 million in renovations to Wrigley. This demand has sparked a wrestling match between Rooftop Owners, one crabby Alderman, the Landmarks Commission and the Mayor of Chicago. According to plans, the exterior will be restored to 1938 status, a year the Cubs were swept in the World Series which is in itself surprising on multiple levels.
Wrigley is already a local landmark, but will work to achieve National Landmark Status while implementing the renovations simultaneously. The most impressive aspect of the project is that it will all be done with private money.

But as negotiations floundered, Tom Ricketts knew the trump card lay in the pocket of his David Beckham Collection, double breasted, Armani suit lined with the fur of the rare and endangered Pamir Spotted Zebra all along. But does the owner of the Chicago Cubs really want to go down in history as the man who tore down Wrigley? Did he pay $900 million for the team just to have the chance at writing an even darker chapter of history in what has already been a genuinely lackluster and laughable existence?

I suppose it’s fitting the Ricketts and the Cubs found each other considering the Ricketts family is ranked 371 out of the 400 Wealthiest People according to Forbes, this of course places them near last on the list and that’s where the team has been languishing since the day the Ricketts bought them.

Being one of only a handful who could pay cash for the Space Shuttle is proof Tom Ricketts is undoubtedly a smart man. Surely then he understands 97.8% of Cubs Fans are so because of Wrigley Field. Does anyone really believe Cubs Fans actually follow their team? The same one that hasn’t won a World Series since Teddy Roosevelt was President? The one that hasn’t appeared in a World Series since we were dropping bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

Cubs Fans live for Wrigley. They are fans because the Cubs are one of the last franchises left who embrace losing. OK, so maybe it’s not so much the losing as it is the belief that a World Series title can only be fully appreciated if preceded by a lifetime of
extreme heartache and disappointment first.

It’s the pomp and circumstance that lures Cubs Fans out in droves year after year. The fact the Cubs happen to play baseball at Wrigley Field is secondary and serves only to force people to hang around a bit longer than normal for fear of appearing rude.
Cubs Fans embrace Wrigley for all that the park stands for. Things like the Ivy, pad-less brick walls, occasional chunks of concrete falling from the ceiling of the grandstands and Bleacher Bums fumbling their way through the Seventh Inning Stretch while sharing overpriced refreshments with the heads, shoulders and laps of their fellow man. For all of mankind, the sooner those in high places realize the rare gem they have in Wrigley the better.


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© 2013 Eric Walker Williams